you ever just sit and realise u can’t remember 80% of your childhood? like … what happened? who am i ..?
Many people in the comments are saying “trauma”, but this is actually a very normal occurrence. It’s called Childhood Amnesia, and it’s a process which, as the brain reorganizes itself for cognitive thought that is developed in late childhood, it changes the Accessibility of those memories during recall. Many childhood memories are available to the person, but they will not be remembered during regular recall activity, you have to “trick” your brain into remembering with different tactics.
This is because there are two parts to memories – their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It can’t be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.
This is an important distinction, because trauma memory is “stored in the body”, i.e. you get triggers that send your body into a cascade of uncontrollable feelings, sensations and reactions. Whereas childhood memories won’t generally do that, they are just recalled at odd times with odd associations.
reblogging this because I’ve legit seen people freaking out when they realised they can’t remember some of their childhood, thinking they might have some repressed trauma.
These are the same people who go “you can’t show teenagers being gay, you’re forcing your own sexuality onto *children*! WON’T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!”
Because apparently self-awareness is queer culture.
Tumblr is apparently doing some crazy nonsense again, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pillowfort.io is a new social media platform that aims to give users control of their content and how it’s seen and shared, as well as provide better communication tools to promote conversation and creativity. If this sounds good to you, you can donate $5 to our PayPal and you will receive a registration link the Friday after your donation. And if you decide the site isn’t for you, you can request a refund for up to three weeks after you sign up. (All money we receive through this process is going towards paying our hosting expenses and compensating our programmers.)
i spent christmas alone while my family got together and fought, and honestly i feel so good about this
i bought myself presents, cooked a big meal, drank wine and watched Home Alone 3 w/ my dog. I don’t feel sorry for myself at all.
meanwhile my sister threatened to disown my dad so he threatened to disown her, while my mom enabled and my other sister downed a bottle of wine to deal.
on the other side of the country, i was busy discovering, to my delight, that the that the 3rd installment of the Home Alone franchise not only stood up to the test of time, but contains some of the best oneliners and comedic timing I have ever seen.
honestly, keep toxic people out of your life. family isn’t everything, and bad family is often worse than no family. don’t be afraid to put in some distance, especially during high stress times like the holidays. you don’t actually owe them anything.
being alone for the holidays is so much better than being with people who make you unhappy.
Bringing this back for Thanksgiving!
I want all of my followers with homophobic, lesbophobic, transphobic, biphobic etc… parents to read this.
Frankenuff’s Castle 